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David Pacchioli

David Pacchioli

My brother is easily identified in the field by his characteristic pose: A palm is raised to within a few inches of his face, which is down-turned, studious. The index finger of the other hand is acting as a pointer and a probe. He's picked some tiny thing, some leaf or bug, from a bush or a tuft of grass, and is scrutinizing it.

Most people think of Antarctica as an endless frozen waste, windblown and flat as a tabletop. Vast it is, and 98 percent ice, but the near-mythic "southern land," with an area larger than Australia, isn't exactly featureless. Mountain ranges, including a few active volcanoes, dot its topography. One of these ranges, the Transantarctic, splits the continent into east and west, its rugged peaks in places topping 14,000 feet. It's an upwelling on the order of the Rockies.

Think of Italy, and the mind drifts inevitably to food. Tagliatelle con tartufo nero. Zuppa di pesce. Saltimbocca alla Romana. These days, thinking of Italian food means thinking also of nutrition. The so-called Mediterranean diet, with its essentials of olive oil, pasta, tomatoes, and red wine, is championed for heart health and longevity by doctors and nutritionists around the world. What better place than Italy to study the science of food?

Join a team of Penn State researchers and our own intrepid reporter in Trinidad as they kick off "Plants Without Borders," a project aimed at sharing some of the latest technology for growing one of the world's favorite crops--cocoa. During ten days in-country, associate professor of plant molecular biology Mark Guiltinan and his team plan to build a greenhouse for raising cocoa seedlings, complete with irrigation system.

It's morning—already—and you're sitting in front of your terminal, struggling to remember just what it is you're supposed to be doing. Your trusty mug of coffee is steaming away at your side. How much do you have to think about what happens next?

Today is a burn day. The test cell, a ten-by-ten-foot square with corrugated steel walls and ceiling and a steel-and-concrete floor, feels chilly, even though its heavily reinforced door is open to the summer air. Just outside, a massive vine-covered bunker looms almost within reach, its 15-foot height blocking from view all but a swatch of blue sky. Butterflies flit on the vines.

Meandering rivers are commonly flanked by earthy embankments higher than the surrounding land: the buildup from floodwaters dropping layers of sediment. Natural levees, geologists call these formations. "As it moves out over the floodplain," Peter Adams explains, "the water loses its turbulent intensity, and the sediment just falls out."

There's a traffic light near where I live that is never green. For three years now, I have approached this light. From every direction; at every hour; at all rates of speed, and employing every conceivable mode of conveyance except the rickshaw and the pogo stick: Car, truck, van, clean natural gas-powered bus, bicycle, and size-12 (okay, 13) running shoes. It has never failed to make me wait. Never. Never green.

"The thing we miss most when we come here," a Brazilian graduate student told me earnestly about studying in the United States, "is good food." After spending just a week in Brazil last summer, I know exactly what he means.

James "Mac" McIntyre had been scouting the Republic of Vanuatu for six weeks without success. Starting in the capital of Port Vila, on the island of Éfaté, the stocky, energetic field zoologist—former rancher, carpenter, and logger—had hopped island to island, traveling by prop plane and motorboat, talking to everyone he met: fruit vendors at open-air markets, fishermen at boat landings, loungers on street corners, expatriates in bars. Where could he find the animal the islanders referred to as "pig half-man half-woman"?

"Innumerable suns exist; innumerable earths revolve about these suns in a manner similar to the way the seven planets revolve around our sun. Living beings inhabit these worlds." The Italian philosopher-astronomer Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for these words in the year 1600.

A rocket engine is simple in concept. Take your fuel and your oxidizer, bring the two together, toss in a spark, channel the resulting combustion through an exhaust nozzle, and Voilà! You’ve got liftoff.

The oxidizer reacts with the fuel, destabilizes it. The spark sets the whole thing in motion. The heat generated by the products of combustion is converted to kinetic energy by the nozzle. Pressurized gas squeezing through the nozzle pushes the rocket ship into the sky.

For researchers working on the Penn State artificial heart, one problem is hemolysis, or damage to red blood cells. Observed in laboratory simulations and in animals implanted with the heart, hemolysis can result in clotting.

What causes it?

It's hard to spot a flaw in the heart itself: a fist-sized shell of plastic containing a seamless sack made of a special biocompatible polymer. There are no rough spots, no discontinuities.

When I heard that Dan Mushalko would be at this year's Graduate Research Exhibition, I didn't know quite what to expect. This is, after all, a man who announced the birth of his second child with an e-mail message headed, "The Clone Experiments, part 2."